(very) New NixOS user and Windows refugee here. Loving it so far, but there’s a lot to get to grips with!
So I’ve seen that Plasma 6.2 is out. And I figured trying to get that onto my system would be a good exercise.
I’ve since realised I barely even know where to start. I assume this is something that flakes would solve?
I’m on the stable channel (24.05), and my understanding is that currently has plasma-workspace 6.0.5.1 available.
So my Nix Config here is never going to let me move away from that:
# Enable the KDE Plasma Desktop Environment.
services.displayManager.sddm.enable = true;
services.desktopManager.plasma6.enable = true;
As far as I can tell, I’ve got two options:
1: Go unstable, which has plasma-workspace 6.2.2 available.
2: Do something fancy in my Nix configuration.
I’ve no practical qualms about going with Option 1, but for the sake of learning, can anyone help me understand how I might approach this with the current stable NixOS version? (or any future version where included packages aren’t what I’m after, for that matter)
Mixing stable and unstable is always a risk, however you hold it.
If you take Plasma from unstable then there are inevitably going to be (transitive) dependencies that will break since they are from your stable system, while plasma is expected to have newer versions that are not in stable (yet).
As hint: plasma/kde as total software suite is most likely 3/4 of your closure size, and also you will likely needs to disable a lot of stable modules and replace with the unstable versions
If that even results in a bootable system, you will not have anything that someone can support so (and as it was asked how to do that, likely help is still appreciated on other topics).
Therefore I highly recommend to just switch to unstable.
24.11 will be released end of the month, you can then just switch back to the stable release.
Or just wait for 24.11 if that is okay (that would be the easiest)
Method wise you can do that with all variants, flakes, channels or something like npin, as long as you can refer it in your config.
The “hard” task is to tinker your system config together in a way that still is consistent, getting the nixpkgs versions together is the easy part.
There is no practical way you’re going to get Plasma 6.2 on NixOS 24.05. It’s too many packages and it’s hooked in too closely with the rest of your system.
One possible and quite practical (though laborious) way would be to backport plasma 6.2 to 24.05 yourself. Just need to cherry-pick all patches touching it.
